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Automata, Matching and Foraging Behavior of Bees

Authors:

Frank Thuijsman, Bezalel Peleg, Mor Amitai & Avi Shmida

Abstract:

In this paper we discuss two types of foraging strategies for bees. Each of these explicit strategies explains that in the environment of a monomorphic bee community the bees will distribute themselves over the available homogeneous nectar sources according to the Ideal Free Distribution. At the same time these strategies explain that in single-bee experimental settings a bee will match, by its number of visits, the nectar supply from the available sources (the Matching Law). Moreover, both strategies explain that in certain situations the bees may behave as if they are risk averse, i.e spend more time on the flower type with the lower variance in nectar supply.